Last night on the achroma stream, some more Dexter’s Dragon Riders (DDR) spoilers were revealed, including more details on the new keyword, MOUNT.

MOUNT: During your Main step you may attach this Character to an unmounted Dragon or Drake on your Canvas. When attacking and defending, the rider and mount combined Strength and Shards and act as one Character card.

This is a fun new keyword, allowing your DragonRiders to mount up and attack together, making them (slightly) more formidable in combat, but probably more cricuially making your otherwise puny and easy to erase Dragon Riders more resilient to being attacked. Let’s say you’ve got a Quin (strength 1) and a Mortius Drake (strength 4). You can mount up for a combined Strength and Shard value of 5, allowing you to attack a Chromatic Voyager (strength 4) and neither character be erased.

Treating them as one character only when attacking and defending means that, unlike with objects, if the mount (dragon or drake) is erased by an ACTION, the Dragon Rider survives. The downside is that if they are attacked by a character with POISON, they are both erased, or if your opponent has a very strong character they can erase both the Dragon and Rider with just one attack.

We’ve already seen this keyword on previously spoiled cards, but here’s a new one, Quin:

Quin has an excellent shard value to resolve ratio, matched only by the Norso Glass Eel, but thanks to MOUNT will likely be harder to erase. I could see this character appearing as a common 1-of in contrsucted format, at least in Drake decks. This will be very nice in the precon decks, I’m sure.

Next up, an Action referencing MOUNT:

An interesting effect, allowing your Dragon Rider to go solo. I’m struggling slightly to see the point of using this on your own character, but in the precon games this will be effective when used offensively to dismount an opponent’s Dragon Rider then attack and erase them.

Dragon Riders need Dragons, and here’s a new Dragon from DDR:

Fromp is astonishingly good value. For 3 shards you immediately get at least 1 back, quite probably more, and get a +2 resolve. He is heroic, but this is a much needed card for Dragon decks. Automatically better than the popular Ruber Draco. And talking of cards for Dragon decks:

Combine Cascada’s Ridge with Fromp, plus Dragon’s Watch from The Last Snow Dragons, Strength in Numbers, and Draco Fledgling, and you could quickly find yourself with the workings of a competitive Dragon palette.

Also, Cascada’s Ridge is not heroic, so can be used with itself and/or Mirror Sanctum for even more runaway gain. Next up, a pretty scary Drake:

Thisp, like Fromp, is an effective 3 shard heroic character. It’s interesting looking at the evolution of -2 drakes through the releases. Yes, Thisp is heroic, but he is just so much better value than the original Mortius Drakes.

Plus, that ACTION(!): Drain 2 Shards from any card. It’s amazing having such a strong effect tagged onto an already amazing value Drake. Useful against staples like Blueprint Swirl, or Rabid Dog, not to mention Ray. This card is at minimum a 1-of, if not 2-of, in all of my Draco decks from now on, much like Carmella in Spirata. To make him even more effective, we have the mirror of Cascada’s Ridge, Haskus’ Den:

Drain 1 for each Drake; this feels like a relatively weak effect for 3 shards. Sure, it’s got no ceiling, but we’ve been spoiled with Achrom Haven (steal 1 for each Drake even if it does cost 4) and Brisgavi Samr Totem (3 cost for steal 1 per Brisgavi). Definitely a nice card to have in the precon world; the design is perfectly pitched for the product. But this will likely get crowded out in a competitive Drake deck.

And finally, Young Draco Scale:

This FIND effect is a nice introduction to the mechanic, and given this is costed at 3 (it would probably cost 1-2 shards without the ACTION) you’re paying just a shard and no cards to find a 2 cost Dragon or Drake. The best I can think of is Ruber Draco, and that’d be a nice card to be able to tutor from my deck for sure. I’m sure there’ll be a suitable target for this effect in the precons. There’s no broken combos with this I can see so far, as there’s no super-effective 2 cost Dragons or Drakes. A nice card. Next up, another FIND effect:

This is really similar to Young Draco Scale. You’re paying an extra shard to find a DragonRider, making more efficient use of your hand. I like it. And finally:

This card gives you another reason to mount up. Assuming you have at least 2 mounted characters, you can drain either 4 shards from one card, or 2 from 2 different cards, giving you some useful flexibility. We’ll see how effective this is in the precons soon, but given the two FIND mechanics above, and the fact that the theme of these decks is “Dragon Riders”, I’d be surprised if it was hard to get at least 2 or 3 mounted riders on your canvas to make this a very effective control card. However, given the power level of control cards in Draco Planum in general, I’d be surprised if this was a common card in constructed format.

That’s all for now. The release date of these cards has unfortunately been pushed back to 18 December, but fingers crossed it still make it to us by Christmas.

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